The Sky My Kingdom To many the name of Hanna Reitsch will already be familiar. She was the woman air ace and test-pilot who flew almost every German military aircraft during the war, from the famous Focke-Wulf 190 to the vicious rocket Me 163, which shot up to 30,000 feet in ninety seconds. She played an important part in developing the suicidal piloted Vis with which the Nazis at last desperately sought to stave off their inevitable defeat. She it was too who flew into Berlin in April 1945 with the new Chief of the German Air Staff, and was one of the last people to see Hitler alive in his bunker. In Germany she is almost an legendary figure; and by any reckoning she is one of the greatest pilots the world has known. This is her own story. It is one of the most illuminating war-books that have come out of Germany, giving as it does an insight into the plans of the Luftwaffe at many stages of the war. Yet it is more than a war-book, for Hanna Reitsch's extraordinary career as a test-pilot was only the most dramatic phase of a life which has been wholly devoted to flying. She is in a real sense a child ofthe air age, and the sheerjoy of flight, whether in gliders or in powered aircraft, has seldom been so vividly communicated as it is in these pag
